Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence asks what happens when a machine is built to love and the people around it are not built to love back. The answer, in this 2001 science fiction drama, is abandonment. Haley Joel Osment plays David, a mecha child and the first of his kind programmed to love.
Trailer, via Amblin Entertainment.
A Boy Who Weighs 60 Pounds
David is adopted as a test case by Cybertronics employee Henry Swinton and his wife, Monica. Their real son, Martin, is in suspended animation after contracting a rare disease. Monica activates David’s imprinting protocol, and he becomes her child.
Then Martin is cured and comes home. He goads David into cutting off a piece of Monica’s hair. At a pool party, a friend pokes David with a knife, triggering his self-protection programming. David grabs Martin, and both fall into the pool.
Henry convinces Monica to return David to his creators for destruction. She spares him instead, abandoning him in a forest full of scrap metal and obsolete mechas. David recalls The Adventures of Pinocchio and sets out to find the Blue Fairy.
Jude Law Studies Fred Astaire
Jude Law plays Gigolo Joe, and he studied Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly for the movements Joe emulates. William Hurt is Professor Hobby. Jack Angel voices Teddy, the robotic bear who is David’s companion. Frances O’Connor, Sam Robards, Jake Thomas and Brendan Gleeson also appear.
- Runtime: 146 minutes
- Release date: June 29, 2001
- Released by: Warner Bros. Pictures, DreamWorks Pictures, Amblin Entertainment, Stanley Kubrick Productions
- Genres: Drama, Science Fiction, Adventure
Kubrick Handed It Over in 1995
Stanley Kubrick acquired Brian Aldiss’s 1969 short story “Supertoys Last All Summer Long” in the early 1970s. He hired writers including Aldiss, Ian Watson, Bob Shaw and Sara Maitland. The film sat in development hell partly because Kubrick felt computer-generated imagery was not advanced enough to create David.
Kubrick handed the project to Spielberg in 1995. It gained momentum only after Kubrick died in 1999. Spielberg stayed close to Watson’s treatment and dedicated the film to Kubrick.
What the Film Gets Right
The first hour is the best thing Spielberg made in that decade. Osment avoids blinking and holds himself with programmed good posture, and the effect is unsettling in exactly the right way. The Pinocchio thread gives David a goal, and the goal is the tragedy.
It is a colder, stranger film than its reputation suggests, and a longer one than its ideas require. 6.5 of 10.
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